NELA1Jason - Seven Standards

Pre-Service Administrator Standards

Standard 1: Strategic Leadership Principals will create conditions that result in strategically re-imaging the school’s vision, mission, and goals in the 21st century. Understanding that schools ideally prepare students for an unseen but not altogether unpredictable future, the leader creates a climate of inquiry that challenges the school community to continually re-purpose itself by building on its core values and beliefs about its preferred future and then developing a pathway to reach it.	Standard 2:Instructional Leadership Principals set high standards for the professional practice of 21st century instruction and assessment that result in a no-nonsense accountable environment. The school executive must be knowledgeable of best instructional and school practices and must use this knowledge to cause the creation of collaborative structures within the school for the design of highly engaging schoolwork for students, the on-going peer review of this work, and the sharing of this work throughout the professional community.
Standard 3:Cultural Leadership Principals will understand and act on the understanding of the important role a school’s culture plays in contributing to the exemplary performance of the school. Principals must support and value the traditions, artifacts, symbols and positive values and norms of the school and community that result in a sense of identity and pride upon which to build a positive future. A principal must be able to “re-culture” the school if needed to align with school’s goals of improving student and adult learning and to infuse the work of the adults and students with passion, meaning and purpose. Cultural leadership implies understanding the school and the people in it each day, how they came to their current state, and how to connect with their traditions in order to move them forward to support the school’s efforts to achieve individual and collective goals.	Standard 4:Human Resource Leadership Principals will ensure that the school is a professional learning community. Principals will ensure that process and systems are in place, which results in recruitment, induction, support, evaluation, development and retention of high performing staff. The principal must engage and empower accomplished teachers in a distributive manner, including support of teachers in day-to-day decisions such as discipline, communication with parents/guardians, and protecting teachers from duties that interfere with teaching, and must practice fair and consistent evaluations of teachers. The principal must engage teachers and other professional staff in conversations to plan their career paths and support district succession planning.
Standard 5:Managerial Leadership Principals will ensure that the school has processes and systems in place for budgeting, staffing, problem solving, communicating expectations and scheduling that result in organizing the work routines in the building. The principal must be responsible for the monitoring of the school budget and the inclusion of all teachers in the budget decision so as to meet the 21st century needs of every classroom. Effectively and efficiently managing the complexity of every day life is critical for staff to be able to focus its energy on improvement.	Standard 6:External Development Leadership A principal will design structures and processes that result in community engagement, support, and ownership. Acknowledging that schools no longer reflect but, in fact, build community, the leader proactively creates with staff, opportunities for parents/guardians, community and business representatives to participate as “stockholders” in the school such that continued investment of resources and good will are not left to chance.
Standard 7:Micro-political Leadership Principals will build systems and relationships that utilize the staff’s diversity, encourage constructive ideological conflict in order to leverage staff expertise, power and influence in order to realize the school’s vision for success. The principal will also creatively employ an awareness of staff’s professional needs, issues, and interests to build cohesion and to facilitate distributed governance and shared decision-making.